Home and building automation is becoming even more popular with the support and use of personal area networks that allow local network enabled devices to wirelessly communicate with one another using low-power digital radios.
The Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) has ratified the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for mesh or personal area networks. ZigBee™ is one type of a standards certified suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. ZigBee™ specification is thus targeted for use with network enabled appliances and applications that require a low data rate, long battery life, as well as require secure networking. Some examples of such appliances and applications include: Home Entertainment and Control (e.g. Home automation, smart lighting, advanced temperature control, safety and security, movies and music); Wireless Sensor Networks; Industrial control; Embedded sensing; Medical data collection; Smoke and intruder warning; Building automation and the like. ZigBee™ has a defined rate of 250 kbit/s best suited for periodic or intermittent data or a single wireless signal transmission between network appliances and ZigBee™ enabled network gateways. Data transmission rates between ZigBee™ enabled network devices vary from 20 to 900 Kbps. Any ZigBee™ compatible network appliance can be tasked with running on the ZigBee™ network. Such ZigBee™ appliances are designed to have radios that operate on an established country specific frequency bands (i.e. 868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in USA/Australia, 2.4 GHz in most other countries) as well as 60 KB-256 KB integrated flash memory. However, the ZigBee™ suite was designed to have standardized application profiles that were specific to the type of market application in which the standard was to be used. For example, the ZigBee™ standard includes discreet application profiles for Home Automation; Smart Energy; Telecommunication Services; Health Care; RF4CE—Remote Control, etc. Each application profile has different set communication protocols within the PAN as well as gateways and servers, policy and decision making guidelines, memory usage, data rates and the like. Typically, ZigBee™ network appliances communicate with one or more servers over a wide area network (i.e. Internet), wherein one or more gateways sitting on the edge of a Personal Area Network (PAN) relay the communications between the network appliances and the servers. However, considering there can be several different close range ZigBee™ network appliances, many of which utilize different application profiles in a particular PAN, the sheer handling of data as well as load balancing and other optimization processes must be handled by the servers. Accordingly, the overall wide area network (between the PAN and the servers) can get bogged down with handling machine to machine communications, while also having to handle traditional network messaging. There exists lot of such ZigBee™ network with sensors/actuators in enterprise network nowadays. The gateway acts as local node aggregator which captures data from sensors/actuators and passes them to central server or accepts command from central server and passes them on to actuator to take any action. The U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/186535 deals with a system and method for locally managing network devices utilizing low cost/lost power wireless machine to machine communication protocols. In general, the said patent application proposes a smart zigbee energy framework for a single gateway self-management.
However, the above prior art does not support energy management across one or more gateways enabling optimal utilization of energy and providing maximum runtime for all appliances connected to a network. For example, if suppose in an enterprise there are two gateways in a network and are allocated with some gateway energy budget for each gateway to run appliances connected to the gateways. Considering in one gateway due to gateway energy budget crisis it has to shut down an actuator associated with a printer, while the other gateway in the same enterprise network has budget allocation which is more than enough.
There has to be a framework, system and method for the gateways in an enterprise to communicate and redistribute energy among themselves and letting maximum runtime of appliances connected to the network and still pertaining to the total energy budget allocation by the enterprise.
Thus, there is a need for a framework, system and a method that can leverage one or more group level decisions and redistribute allocated energy budget by the enterprise among the one or more associated gateways, thereby enabling optimal utilization of energy and maximum runtime to the network appliances. That is, the framework, system and method should help the gateways to mutually work and be socially active to help each other if some of them is apprehending energy budget run out and enabling the socially aware gateways to interact among themselves and redistribute energy to support maximum run time of appliances connected to the enterprise network and still pertaining to the overall energy budget allocated by the enterprise to run all the appliances connected to the enterprise network.